Book Image

Practical Hardware Pentesting

By : Jean-Georges Valle
Book Image

Practical Hardware Pentesting

By: Jean-Georges Valle

Overview of this book

If you’re looking for hands-on introduction to pentesting that delivers, then Practical Hardware Pentesting is for you. This book will help you plan attacks, hack your embedded devices, and secure the hardware infrastructure. Throughout the book, you will see how a specific device works, explore the functional and security aspects, and learn how a system senses and communicates with the outside world. You’ll set up a lab from scratch and then gradually work towards an advanced hardware lab—but you’ll still be able to follow along with a basic setup. As you progress, you’ll get to grips with the global architecture of an embedded system and sniff on-board traffic, learn how to identify and formalize threats to the embedded system, and understand its relationship with its ecosystem. You’ll discover how to analyze your hardware and locate its possible system vulnerabilities before going on to explore firmware dumping, analysis, and exploitation. The reverse engineering chapter will get you thinking from an attacker point of view; you’ll understand how devices are attacked, how they are compromised, and how you can harden a device against the most common hardware attack vectors. By the end of this book, you will be well-versed with security best practices and understand how they can be implemented to secure your hardware.
Table of Contents (20 chapters)
1
Section 1: Getting to Know the Hardware
6
Section 2: Attacking the Hardware
12
Section 3: Attacking the Software

Planning the test

After some workshops with your client and gaining more information about the target system, you should have identified the following:

  • The crown jewels and their security functions
  • The testing scenarios and questions (and validated them with your client)
  • Identified a global "difficulty level" for your scenarios (depending on the "box color", you may already know if a certain component or security function is more or less well-protected)

Now, the question is, How do we allocate time to which scenario? This is a difficult question, especially when you're utilizing a black box approach (since you have no details about the system architecture). Let's talk more about this balancing act.

Balancing your scenarios

Typically, your scenarios will have an associated impact and difficulty. Let's be realistic: at this point, these impacts and difficulties are mainly "gut feelings" since we haven't done...